- -. - .:,,:--:.:.. --- : ,' \ ' -,' J" , ,_ ' </ , -"j,t _ " :.: - " t b / I } \ \ ) ',1 \ L ,/' <" I "'... ... .. ... <t. ..; . .....*/ .. .. ...;;.. . '\ (.. \ . :,.. . : '. . ;. . 'J r. - ,.,1 .. ... . "'.' :." ....f/ , !lflt . ' . : .... =="'" '.'- 4::\;; é' ;;;:f t ::l ..., y,ï'_ , . ",':0 ; t",- "_, .r }/. ,. [ -, > ,""'- ",,; , . c--" MAf..15!\ Ac OCEL.Lfr ''I'm on Fendi and Prada, and heading toward Louis. " . olina. On the first da the class was suf- fering through an arduous session of cal- isthenics called a "smoker" when an ex- tremely overweight cadet from South Carolina began to falter. "We were doing pushups," Martin Bartness, a member of that class who is now assigned to the Baltimore Police drug-enforcement sec- tion, recalled. "We could see the big guy wasn't going to make it, and all of a sud- den Brian Pearson"-a fellow-cadet- "literally puts the guy on his back and does the pushups for him. Now, Brian almost became a professional boxer. He can hold me down with one arm-and I'm pretty strong. But we didn't know that then. We just saw him do this amaz- 76 THE NEW YOR.KER., MAR.CH 18, 2002 . ing, selfless thing. The message was: We're all going to get through this to- gether. The bond we developed was in- credibly strong, and it still is." Pearson is now a member of Balti- more's Qyick Response Team (the local name for SWAT) and spent much of last fall training the latest Maryland Police Corps class. He is a quiet redhead, a graduate of East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, who manages, some- how, to seem simultaneously imposing and unassuming. Mter graduation from the Police Corps academy, Pearson was assigned to foot patrol in Baltimore's Western district, which is widely re- garded as the toughest in town. "Every- one in the department was skeptical when we came out of the academy," Pearson told me over dinner in a down- town hotel recend after noting that he hadn't had many sit-down meals during his three years on patrol. "The veterans thought we were preppies sent in to rat them out. The word was 'Don't do any- thing around the college kids. Don't talk to the college kids.' " The Western district is a bleak, tree- less expanse, studded with abandoned town houses and populated by an aston- ishing number of heroin addicts. (The Health Department estimates that eight per cent of Baltimore's six hundred thou- sand residents are addicted to some drug or other.) Pearson and Todd Corriveau, who had also graduated with the first Police Corps class, quickly gained a rep- utation for aggressiveness. "We made an immediate impact," Pearson told me. "We were making twenty; thirty arrests a month, mosdy drugs." (Though no sta- tistics are kept, several Baltimore police officials told me that the average patrol officer makes eight to twelve arrests per month.) "We were making so manyar- rests that one of the local drug gangs put a hit out on us. Homicide flooded the area and nothing ever came of the death threat. We just continued to do our covert stuf hiding in abandoned buildings, dumpsters, alleys. The dealers were so busy looking for patrol cars, they usually didn't see us coming. And we spent a lot of our off-duty hours going to community meetings, helping out in any way we could." On the morning of July 14, 1998, Pearson and Corriveau were returning to their post after making a drug arrest when a woman ran up to them to report a fire. In Baltimore, only firefighters are sup- posed to enter burning buildings; the po- lice manage crowd control and emer- gency services outside. But when Pearson and Corriveau saw flames and thick black smoke pouring from the three- story brick row house they didn't hesitate. "Brian just ran through the front door," Corriveau recalled. ' soon as I saw that, I went in, too. I took two men out from the first floor while Brian went upstairs. I tried to join him, but the place was just engulfed in smoke. He could have died up there. Lucky there was a fire escape." Pearson took five people, including three children, out from the second floor.